Look at me, pressing some words.

After 10 years of living life without writing about it, I am back. Instead of having a nice domain like lkvy.com, wordpress has given me the worst URL. I know it’s an attempt to get me to pay for a nicer one. Nice try, wordpress.

Anyway, I know people are more likely to bookmark a jacked up web address that they would never memorize.

When I first started blogging in May 2000, I didn’t even know there was a word for what I was doing. My original intention with my geocities page (est. 1998) was to coax people into returning. I merely wanted to learn how to build my own website and for that, I had to learn some HTML (and later on, some CSS); how to use a buggy, pirated version of Photoshop; pad it with some somewhat interesting content (which, at the time, was a page about dolphins).

But nobody was coming back for the dolphins. To randomly quote John Laroche in Adaptation, “Fuck fish… Done with fish.” Nobody was impressed that I knew the HTML code for the scrolling marquee.

I had to beg people to sign my guestbook.

Then, in early 2000, I finally met another Deaf person who was into web designing: Gator. Not only were her coding skills far superior to mine, but she had cracked the code for getting return visitors. She was posting something new every day in the form of an online journal and because she was my age, a lot of that crap was delightfully melodramatic. “Ooh! I can do that, too!” I thought.

So, I started writing for an audience I didn’t have, and didn’t ever really get. I wrote hundreds of posts over a span of 8 or 9 years.

Did I waste hours trying to convince strangers on the internet that my life was extraordinary?

Now, I realize that I had inadvertently given my future self (which is now my present self, imagine that!) a goldmine of memories to read back on. You won’t find my old blog posts anywhere online (lkvy.com was so unpopular that even the Wayback Machine didn’t bother archiving anything): they’re all on two CDs. HUNDREDS of Salon of Shame-worthy posts that I can get embarrassed in secret about.

When I am 44, I would like to understand what I thought I understood at the age of 34.

So, yeah, I am gonna, like, press some words real good.